Generally, livestock confinement facilities provide for increased livestock production with greater efficiency than traditional, agricultural facilities. In fact, for decades, many farmers have specifically selected confinement facilities in order to improve livestock health, increase livestock growth rates, and reduce production costs to generate cost savings from farmers to consumers. However, increased competition within the agricultural industry has decreased profit margins, resulting in the necessity for larger confinement facilities housing increased densities of livestock per square foot.
Specifically, modern poultry confinement facilities extend along a farm for hundreds of yards with similarly long, narrow aisles for maximizing poultry density with the confinement facility. Each aisle provides access to elevated livestock cages, such as poultry cages, arranged in rows and columns along generally the entire length of the confinement facility. Rather than reduce the amount of space for each animal to increase livestock density, farmers are more likely to increase the vertical stacking height of the elevated poultry cages. For example, elevated poultry cages may range in height from eight feet or more from the floor of the confinement facility. Thus, each animal receives enough space for proper health and growth rates while increasing the amount of animals within the confinement facility.
While increasing the vertical height of elevated poultry cages may help increase profit margins, the maintenance associated with elevated poultry cages currently tends to reduce these profits. The labor associated with inspecting, maintaining, and cleaning livestock cages and medically treating, feeding, and watering livestock is generally referred to as “tending” to the livestock. On one hand, a farm operator on foot may simply and efficiently tend to animals within easy reach from the aisle. On the other hand, tending to the animals within higher elevated poultry cages complicates even simple tasks, which increases time, expense, and burden on the farm operator.
For example, every elevated poultry cage is routinely inspected and cleaned while tending to the livestock. Typically, the farm operator inspects and cleans each elevated livestock cage by one of two known methods. For the first method, the farm operator walks along the aisle with a ladder, stopping at each column of elevated livestock cages. The farm operator places the ladder within the aisle and manually climbs the ladder to inspect and clean each cage. Once every livestock cage in the stacked column is clean, the farm operator moves the ladder over several feet and repeats this process for each side of the aisle along the length of the confinement facility. Unfortunately, this method is inefficient, tedious, and extremely time consuming. According to the second method, the farm operator inspects and cleans each livestock cage within reach of the aisle while on foot. Then, the farm operator uses stilts to walk back and forth along the entire length of the aisle while inspecting and cleaning each elevated cage. Despite being more efficient, stilt walking requires considerably more skill and often results in muscular exhaustion due to the need for regular tending of the livestock. As such, the physical labor required to use stilts for tending to elevated livestock cages is often difficult to find and retain.
There is a need for a vehicle and method for tending to elevated livestock cages in a confinement facility, particularly elevated poultry cages, that addresses present challenges and characteristics such as those discussed above.